Sean

Willow. 

Stunned into silence after hearing my daughter’s name, I drove like a bat out of hell. Now and then, I peeled my eyes from the road and looked into the rearview mirror.

Light spilled through the windows, framing the angel molded to her mother’s side. It was like the moon was drawn to her, painting her little features with a luminescent brush. 

My gaze found Anna’s, and I held on tight to those green, green eyes. I was all questions, and she was nothing but answers, but I didn’t say a word, too afraid to open my mouth and unleash the fury clawing its way up my throat. 

How could you not tell me?

As if she’d heard my inner thoughts, Anna smiled, soft and hesitant, and then she looked down at Willow, like maybe that was her answer. 

I drew a blank as I tried to recall anything that I’d accomplished in the past four years that I wouldn’t sacrifice to know her, that little angel with my eyes and her mother’s face. 

Pulling my car under the awning next to the emergency room door, I found my voice when Anna jumped out. 

“Anna!” I barked, my feet hitting the pavement as she hustled to the automatic doors, cradling Willow in her arms.

Anna froze, hesitated for a long moment, then turned. “Thank you for the ride. You don’t have to stay, though. My mom’s coming.” 

Incredulous, I closed the distance between us. “I’m going to park the car.” Infusing calm into my voice my eyes dipped to Willow. “Where can I find you?”

Anna’s silent scrutiny caused a chemical reaction that set my blood on fire.

If she thought she could dismiss me without an explanation . . .

“Fourth floor. Pediatrics.” 

Anna’s voice was hushed, and I strained to hear her over the hum of traffic from the busy street. 

“I’ll be right up.” With a last look at Willow, I turned on my heel and then stalked back to the SUV. 

Once I was behind the wheel, I sucked in a breath and cut my gaze to the door. Anna was nowhere in sight, and that old feeling crept from a long-buried place. The same thing I’d felt when Anna walked out of my house a few days ago. Despair. Only now it was worse. 

I found the first available parking spot and then jumped out of the car, the white cross on the side of the building illuminating my path to the door.

I didn’t have to look to know it was there. On my mother’s final stay, her hospital room sat in the shadow of that cross. Every day I stood at her window, praying that God would spare her, and when he didn’t, I vowed never to set foot in a church or Brackenridge hospital again. 

Shattering that promise when I marched through the doors, all the sights and sounds came back to me in a rush. I was twelve again, and as I stood there reeling, I couldn’t for the life of me remember where Anna had told me to go. 

“Excuse me.” Addressing the nurse behind the high desk below the sign marked information, I waited for her to look up, and when she did my overstimulated brain shut down. 

She lifted a pale brow. “Yes?”

“The baby floor, where is it?” 

The baby floor? Jesus. 

The nurse cocked her head, her gaze traveling the length of my long hair. “You mean, pediatrics?” 

“Yeah . . . er, yes. Pediatrics.” 

The nurse clasped her hands in front of her, all business. “Who are you looking for, sir?” 

I felt my patience ebb, but one glance at the security guard posted a few feet away, and I got my temper under control so that I wouldn’t end up in jail. 

“My friend, I gave her a ride. Her baby was having an asthma attack.” 

The nurse sighed, pushed her frameless glasses up her nose, and then turned to her computer screen. “Name?”

Shaking my head, I bit down my frustration. “Listen, she just got here. I don’t think—”

Without looking up, she repeated. “Name?” 

“Kent.” The wave of bile that accompanied Anna’s married name threatened to spill all over the nurse’s white uniform. But I swallowed it down, along with my pride. “Willow Kent.”

Gnashing my teeth, I looked up at the ceiling while the nurse pecked away on her keyboard. I was about to go thermonuclear when she said, “Yes, Willow Grace Kent. She’s been a patient here a number of times.” She blinked at me, wrinkles furrowing her brow. “Sir, are you all right?”

“Um . . . Willow Grace, you said?” 

My mother’s name rolled off my tongue like thick molasses.

“Yes.” Wary, the nurse glanced at her screen to confirm. “Willow Grace Kent.” 

“Where . . .” I cleared my throat. “Which floor, ma’am?”

A stiff breeze could’ve bowled me over, so any threat I posed was long gone.

The nurse softened, expelling a sigh. “I’m sorry, but pediatrics is a locked ward,” she explained with a smile. “You’ll need a member of the child’s immediate family to escort you in. You said you came here with her mother?” I nodded dumbly. “Well then, if you could call her, I’m sure they’ll let you in.” 

Anger, frustration, and helplessness collided and I was about to lose it, security guard or not, but in the nick of time, I heard my name. Turning to the voice like a drowning man in search of a life jacket, I lost my breath when Alecia Dresden flung her arms around me. 

“Oh my God,” she whispered. “You’re really here.” 

Engulfed by the scent of floral perfume, I squeezed my eyes shut, melting into Anna’s mother’s embrace. She smelled like home. Like reassurance. All the things I had no right to demand, but couldn’t decline. 

Pulling away, she asked, “Is Anna upstairs with the baby?”

The baby. Willow.

My daughter. 

I couldn’t speak or think, and Alecia’s smile faded before my eyes. “Anna said you were coming.” She took a step back, settling her tote over her shoulder. “Were you just giving her a ride?” 

“No. I just . . . I can’t get in.” I licked my dry lips. “It’s a locked floor, and I’m not . . .” 

Anything.

The realization stifled my stammering attempt to explain.

Alecia nodded, then flashed a smile to the woman behind the desk. “I’ll get him out of your hair, Shelly.” 

And with that, Alecia slipped her arm in mine and guided us to the elevators. 

As we waited, she let out a weary sigh and then lamented, “Unfortunately, I know this place like the back of my hand. What with Willow’s issues and all.” 

Issues? 

I lost feeling in my limbs, and unable to form a question, I followed her gaze around the vast space.

When I spotted a kid of about fifteen staring bleakly at the screen on his laptop, his eyes darting to the doors with the big red sign that read TRAUMA every few seconds, my throat constricted.

The kid could’ve been me when I was twelve, waiting for my mother to emerge from her latest round of chemo. The only difference being, a glimmer of hope still shined in his eyes, and by the time I was twelve, I had none. 

Shaking off the memory, I sidestepped the horde of people spilling from the elevator and then joined Alecia in the back. My eyes took permanent residence on the ground, on the faint but visible stains discoloring the tile. Blood and tears and other things that wouldn’t wash away. 

Alecia tugged my hair and I looked up. Her lips twitched as if she were trying to suppress a smile. “How does Melissa feel about this mane of yours?” 

It was odd talking to anyone about my family. Because both my parents were dead, reporters steered clear of those questions, and as a result, my aunt Melissa and her daughter Chelsea had remained mostly hidden from the public eye. 

Relaxing for the first time in what seemed like hours, I shrugged. “She says I’m the niece she always wanted.” Recalling Anna’s hands in my hair, gripping and tugging and pulling me against her, I smiled. “Your daughter likes it, though.” 

Which, sadly, was the main reason I wore it so long. Pitiful, but Anna’s fingers twining in my hair was something I’d missed these last four years. Alecia tsked, but I continued to smile because she’d just reminded me of how I felt about her daughter.

Yeah, I was pissed as hell at Anna right now, but I was madder at myself. 

My anger took a backseat as the elevator coasted to a stop on the fourth floor. It was one thing to make it through the lobby at Brackenridge and another to enter one of the wards.

To my surprise, when the doors snicked open, the utilitarian concrete floors were no longer plain white tile but covered in stickers shaped like bricks. A sunny yellow path that led to a mural of the emerald city painted on the wall.

Follow the yellow brick road.

Falling into step behind Alecia we headed for another desk.

“Hi, Mrs. Dresden.” A nurse with a bright smile passed Alecia a green sticker with a smiley face imprinted in the center. “Anna’s in Room 437.” Frowning, she added, “I’m sorry about Willow. Poor little thing’s had a bad week.” 

“Indeed,” Alecia replied, her gaze flicking to mine. “This is Sean Hudson. You can add him to the list of approved visitors.”

The nurse turned to me, and her jaw dropped open. “Um . . . sure. Sean Hudson, you said?” 

Color sprang to her cheeks as she waited for confirmation of what she already knew.

I nodded, wearing the neutral expression I used in public when I didn’t want to be bothered.

The nurse handed me a yellow sticker. “You can go back with Mrs. Dresden, but no longer than fifteen minutes.” She smiled apologetically. “Immediate family only after visiting hours.”

Taking the sticker, I stared at the imprint, a protest on the tip of my tongue. I was Willow’s family. Her father. 

Luckily, Alecia came to my rescue. “Sean is family. He’s Willow’s…” Flustered, she struggled to find a word for me, and when none came, she waved her hand. “Like I said, he’s family. Anna will call and straighten it out later.” 

The nurse’s eyes volleyed back and forth between Alecia and me as she fiddled with the spool of green stickers. I’m guessing those bad boys were the keys to the emerald city, and at the moment, I’d trade anything in my possession for just one. 

Before I embarrassed myself by resorting to bribery, the nurse peeled off a sticker and turned it over to Alecia. “I’ll give this to you,” she said, her tone just above a whisper. “I don’t want to get into any trouble with Mr. or Mrs. Kent.” 

Alecia’s smile tightened. “Oh, is Dean here?”

The nurse shook her head. “No. I just meant if he comes by . . .” Her thought trailed, her dreamy gaze returning to my face. 

I tried not to grimace, both from the look and the mention of the dude who was posing as my child’s father. 

Alecia offered her thanks to the nurse, and coaxing me from the desk, she whispered out of the corner of her mouth. “You’d think we were trying to sneak into the Pentagon.” She sighed as we stepped through the double doors and onto the ward. “But then again, she’s only trying to protect your daughter, so I can’t fault her.” 

My daughter.

The first time anyone said those words, and it wasn’t Anna. Questions piled up like stones, weighing me down as we walked to the end of the busy corridor. 

Alecia came to an abrupt halt in front of Room 437.

“Before you go in, we need to talk.” As if it were a foregone conclusion, she dropped onto one of the god-awful plastic chairs lining the wall. 

Every fiber in my being gravitated to the door and what was behind it, but since Alecia seemed to be my only ally, I took a seat beside her. 

“I don’t know what happened between you and Anna and I gave up asking a long time ago,” Alecia said. I shifted my gaze her way, but her attention was elsewhere. Like she couldn’t look at me. “But Willow . . .” 

The slight I felt at being labeled a deadbeat dad evaporated with those two words. Any way you sliced it, my choices had reduced Anna to a footnote in my life, and now our baby was a “but.” 

I sighed heavily at the realization. 

“I’m sorry I wasn’t around,” I roughed out, hanging my head. “I’m still trying to figure everything out, but If I would’ve known, I would’ve been here.” 

My head snapped up when Alecia grabbed my arm. “What do you mean ‘if you would’ve known’?” Her blunt nails dug into my skin. “Are you telling me that you didn’t know about Willow?”

She stared at me, eyes narrowed in disbelief. 

Resisting the urge to vent, I shook my head. “Not until about an hour ago.” Alecia shot to her feet, and reflexively, I caught her by the arm. “Where are you going?”

“To talk to Anna.” 

“Don’t you think I should be the one to do that?”

Alecia pondered for a moment and then dropped back into her seat. “Oh, Sean . . . I just assumed.” She shook her head and cursed under her breath. “Anna refused to talk about you, except once, when her father wanted to find you and separate your head from your shoulders. I made Anna tell me why I shouldn’t let him.”

My gut twisted at the thought of Anna defending me. 

“What did she say?”

She looked down at her hands. “That you outgrew her. And Austin. That you wanted a different kind of life. And I thought Anna wanted a different kind of life too. Different from me.” Glancing to the room where her granddaughter was secreted away, Alecia’s voice fell to a whisper. “That’s why I told Anna . . . why I suggested . . .” Frowning, she looked at me and sat straighter in her chair. “She had choices, Sean. And I wanted her to know it.”

Choices? 

If I thought I couldn’t feel worse, I was wrong. But what could I say? I’d given up the right to an opinion the minute I walked away from Anna. 

Alecia sighed, then continued, “It backfired, though. Anna got it in her head that I didn’t want her to have Willow. So she up and married Dean, complicating things even more. She never loved him, you know, not the way a wife should love her husband.” 

Alecia’s face contorted, caving under the weight of whatever she thought she’d done.

Which was nothing.

It all came back to me, to my ultimatum, and the night I wanted to forget but never would. 

Looping my arm around Alecia’s shoulders, I brought her in for a hug. “It’s not your fault.” 

She smiled, covering my hand with hers as she tipped her chin to the door. “We’ll talk later. I need to call Brian and tell him to keep the gun at home if he’s coming down here.”

I hadn’t given Brian a second thought until now. 

“I’ll talk to him.”

Alecia cut me off with a snort. “You absolutely will not. Someday soon I suspect you’ll realize there is no reasoning with an angry father. I know my daughter, how willful she is, especially when it comes to you. But Brian?” She sucked air through her teeth. “He’s blind for Anna. From the first day they put her in his arms, she could do no wrong. It was hard enough for him to accept that Anna was pregnant since he’d convinced himself she wasn’t having sex.” She smiled at me. “And we both know that ship sailed on prom night.”

I’d had some uncomfortable conversations in my life, but this one took the cake.

My burning cheeks forced me to my feet. “I’m going to go in.”

Alecia pulled a book from her tote. “You do that, sweetheart. And another thing?” Her smile wavered. “Try not to be too hard on Anna, okay?”

Pleading underscored her light tone, so I nodded. “I’ll try.” 

It was the most I could promise.

Blowing out a breath, I reached for the knob, but the door swung open, and I had to move out of the way to make room for the nurse to exit. When she stopped to scribble something on the dry erase board on the wall, I lingered, hoping to glean some information about Willow’s condition.

The nurse smiled at me and then walked away, leaving me to gape at the two words she’d scrawled in red marker. 

Hearing Impaired.

I jerked my gaze to Alecia, engrossed in her book. 

She looked up. “Anything wrong?” 

From the corner of my eyes, the red letters loomed. 

Hearing impaired.

“No . . . I’m good.” 

But I wasn’t good. The light from good was a pinprick in the distance, so faint I could barely see it. 

I stepped inside the room before Alecia could say anything more. This was one explanation that I wanted to come straight from Anna. 

As the door whooshed closed behind me, I cringed at the bolt clicking into place. It sounded like a gunshot. In fact, everything sounded louder—the humming of the machines, the annoying J. Lo ringtone one wall away, the nurses’ shoes squeaking on the polished floors in the hallway. And Anna’s breath. 

It left her body in a soft exhale as I took my place at her side, gazing down at the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. 

Willow dozed with no outward signs of distress, thick auburn lashes caressing her cherub cheeks. The bulky mask was gone, replaced by a tube attached to her button nose. 

“I’m so fucking pissed at you, Anna,” I whispered through gritted teeth.

“I know.”

“How could you not tell me?”

I glared at her out of the corners of my eye, but her gaze never left Willow’s face. 

“You don’t have to whisper, Sean.” A sad smile curved Anna’s lips as she adjusted the thin blue sheet around our daughter. “She can’t hear you.”

Hearing impaired.

“She’s completely deaf? I heard you talking to her . . .” I ducked my head, searching for Anna’s eyes. I had to see her face. To know everything was all right. “You were talking to her, right?”

Anna eased onto the bed, legs dangling over the side.

She took the longest moment of my life to compose herself and then began in a quiet tone, “She’s not completely deaf. But it’s hard to say what she can and can’t hear. The tests . . . they’re hard to perform on a baby. As far as the doctors can tell, Willow hears at about fifty percent with her hearing aids. But she’s only had them a few months. There was a long period of time when we didn’t know what the problem was.” She sighed wearily as if reliving the memory. “And once the doctors confirmed her hearing loss, we had to go slow. So yes, Willow does speak, but not very much.”

Maybe I was the one with the hearing problem, because I couldn’t process a damn thing Anna’d just told me.

I dropped into the plaid chair with a thud, my focus on Willow. “I don’t understand.” 

Anna squeezed my hand, which I just realized was tangled with hers in a death grip. “Willow’s only had the hearing aids for a few months. We’re turning the volume up a little at a time, so we don’t overload her system. She might hear better than we think. Or worse. She’s going in for another hearing test soon.”

I rubbed my brow, willing away the headache thudding at my temples. “Does she need anything? Special classes? Education?” I offered helplessly. Stupidly. “Just tell me, baby. Whatever I need to do, I’ll do it.” 

Anna looked down at our joined hands. “Willow’s hearing loss—it’s most likely temporary. She’ll have surgery when she’s about five. Right now, she sees a speech therapist. But she’s going to pre-school.” Anna looked me in the eyes, resolute. “A regular school. She’s not deficient in any way. She’s very smart.”

Deficient? 

Even under the harsh lights with their aged covers tinting everything a sickly yellow, Willow looked perfect. 

I scrubbed a hand down my face, hoping the right words would find their way to my thick tongue. “I’m just trying to find my way here, Anna. So cut me some slack, all right?” I pressed a kiss to her palm. “I’m still really fucking mad at you.” 

Anna cupped my cheek, and just like that, she silenced the riot in my head. Leaning into her touch, I closed my eyes. We drifted like that for a moment, until the monitor above Willow’s bed let out a shrill beep. The other machines followed suit.

Every cell in my body jumped to life when Willow rasped, “Ma?”

Cataloging the tone and the pitch, I added it to the symphony of sounds seared into my brain. And I knew without a doubt that in a sea of voices, I’d always hear hers. 

Anna was on her feet, fishing something from her pocket, so I stood too. She leaned over the little angel and popped an earbud into Willow’s ear. 

“There you are.” Anna’s tone was a few decibels above conversational, but gentle, soothing. “Are you feeling better, Willow-baby?” 

Willow-baby.

I watched my little girl’s lips curve into a sleepy smile. Adoration sparked in her azure gaze as she cupped her mother’s cheeks with tiny hands. 

Inching so close that my chest fused to Anna’s back, I whispered, “Is she okay? Can you tell?” 

Willow’s eyes found mine, curious. 

“She’s fine,” Anna said. “But you’re going to have to speak up. She can’t hear what you’re saying.”

Making space for me directly in front of our daughter, Anna said to Willow, “This is Sean, he came to visit you.” 

Hearing Anna refer to me by my given name drowned me in so much regret, I had to fight to keep my smile cemented in place. “Hi, Willow.”

“Sean’s worried about you,” Anna continued in her soft but loud tone. “Can you give him a thumbs up and let him know you’re okay?”

I’d never had my breath taken away, not by a crowd of ten thousand, but Willow did it just by raising her little thumb. 

And when she smiled my whole world flipped upside down.